


Some Legends Are Told

by Rhensis



Category: Free!
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Crossover, M/M, Oops, artist, gekkan shoujo nozaki-kun - Freeform, hell yh folks we got sou as nozaki and rin as mikorin, hope u enjoy this mess, i might write reigisa set in gsnk ????, this is kind of rushed, who knows man who knows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-01
Updated: 2015-02-01
Packaged: 2018-03-10 00:22:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3269789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhensis/pseuds/Rhensis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He flips it open, flicking through the pages until he gets to the last one that Sousuke was drawing on. When he does, he frowns. He turns it upside down as if that'd change the picture, looking at it with about 80% shock, 5% faint amusement and 15% <i>what the actual holy fuck, Sousuke Yamazaki.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Legends Are Told

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote another thing ??? come love me on tumblr (johsaivevo) if u like it  
> Written for [Sourin Week](http://sourinweek.tumblr.com/) (day 7, crossover au)

“Sousuke, shift your ass over,” Rin mumbles, pressing the buttons on his controller even harder as if that would _somehow_ intensify the actions the character on screen makes.

Sousuke doesn’t even seem to register his words. He continues standing there, looking right down at Rin, making a quiet humming noise as if in contemplation. If Rin looked up, he’d see the slight frown on Sousuke’s face and the way that his eyes are slightly screwed up in concentration, but looking up is the _last_ thing on his mind right now when he is going to lose the fucking game because Sousuke will not-

“Oi, Sousuke, _move your ass_ ,” he repeats. Sousuke still doesn’t do anything except for give him a non-committal grunt. Rin feels his blood boiling as he leans forward to try and see through his friend’s legs at the screen, strands of his hair brushing against his cheeks but it’s-

Too late, he realises, as the jarring sound erupts from the speakers. He groans, throwing the controller down by his crossed feet.

“ _Sousuke_ , that was your fucking fault you little bitch,” Rin says without any _real_ malice, crossing his arms and pouting just a little bit.

He _finally_ looks up at Sousuke, whose eyes are slightly droopy as usual, his short fringe hanging slightly off his face. There’s an almost _smug_ expression on the guy’s face and Rin is about to kick him in the shin for it, but something in the way Sousuke narrows his eyes just a little more makes him stop with his leg still in mid-air.

“Dude, it’s creepy to stare,” he points out, making a slightly disgusted face on purpose. Sousuke doesn’t _stop_ , however, and he finds himself looking down with just a faint hint of a blush. He picks up the controller as an excuse not to hold the glare, but Sousuke isn’t just being Sousuke and staring into thin air like he has done so many times, he’s actually staring directly at Rin as if he’s damn well memorising him and Rin can’t help but feel just _slightly_ unnerved.

Pushing himself up off the floor using his legs, Rin doesn’t expect Sousuke’s eyes to follow him as he stands up, let alone meet him as he straightens out his legs. A squeak falls from his lips when he lifts his head up and finds Sousuke’s face just above his, the height difference giving Sousuke an unfair advantage in the staring game.

“Quit it, bro,” Rin mumbles, walking straight past Sousuke without catching his eye again. “I’m not one of your characters, you can’t just stare at me until I do shit,”

“Usually seems to work,” Sousuke mumbles, the first words out of his mouth since he got in the way of Rin’s game in the first place, the suddenness of it _definitely_ not making Rin jump a little.

“What are you doing anyway?” Rin asks, and Sousuke shrugs. Not that Rin can hear that; what he _can_ do however is hear the footsteps behind him, and he turns around from where he’s sorting out the games console to see Sousuke walking back towards his desk.

“That’s it? You’re gonna make me lose my game and then just go back to your work?” Rin asks with a snarl, absolutely unimpressed with his friend’s behaviour. Sousuke just nods affirmatively, picking up his pencil and starting to draw lines onto the paper that he’d abandoned.

Rin can’t do much more than stand there and watch that, mouth hanging open slightly incredulously. If Sousuke is going to stare at him like Nagisa at a shop full of strawberry cakes then it would be only polite for him to explain himself.

Instead of asking Sousuke (he knows he’s not going to get a straight answer), he puts down the game box in his hand and frowns, padding lightly, almost on tip-toes, to behind Sousuke’s chair. He leans over Sousuke’s shoulder to look at what’s being drawn, only to be knocked right off his feet.

It’s only Sousuke that does it and not some intruder, but Rin isn’t prepared, and ends up tumbling to the ground and falling on his butt with a whelp. Sousuke stands over him, a very slight glimmer of concern in his eyes before he simply starts to grin, clearly holding back laughter.

“Fuck you, you idiot, what was that about?” Rin grumbles, cheeks burning red now. He looks behind Sousuke at the chair that the guy had pushed backwards in order to purposefully knock Rin away, and Rin can’t quite gather why he would have done until-

A smile passes over his lips as the lightbulb brightens

“Hey, Sou,” Rin begins, his voice tinted by his tell-tale sarcasm, “what’re you drawing?”

“Hmmph,” is all Sousuke says before turning away again, leaving Rin to get up on his own (again, a lapse of manners on Sousuke’s part, leaving him to get up alone; he can’t quite figure out how this Sousuke is the same Sousuke that’s able to write sparkling protagonists that have girls swooning).

“Sou-ske,” Rin teases, latching on to the back of Sousuke’s chair and placing his chin on Sousuke’s shoulder. “You’re gonna have to show me eventually when you want all the effects drawn,”

“I’ll just get Rei to do it,” Sousuke says with a shrug, and Rin pouts, a hand flying to his chest dramatically.

“Oh, Sousuke, dear Sousuke, how could you do this to me? Don’t give my spot up to some bespectacled nerd, what would I do without you?” The all too accurate impression of Sousuke’s first ever published protagonist makes the teal-eyed boy visibly _shiver_ , turning around to grunt a quick ‘bite me’ under his breath. “Oh, Sousuke-kun, so _cruel_ , don’t tease me so,”

“Fuck you,” Sousuke grumbles, slamming his pad of paper shut. Rin is about to start mumbling a thousand apologises, frightened for a moment that he’s actually upset Sousuke, but then Sousuke’s turning around, obviously fighting away a grin. “Dear Mamiko, oh how I do love you, but oh how much of a _prick_ you are,”

“Hmph, Sousuke, you’re not sticking to your own character’s traits,” Rin says, “Suzuki would _never_ swear in front of a lady,”

Sousuke groans again, holding his face in his hands. It’s rare that Rin actually manages to embarrass him, but using his old characters is a sure fire way of doing it, as he learnt one day by being caught reading (completely accidentally, he’d just picked the wrong book up) Sousuke’s older manga and had spent at least half an hour afterwards giggling at how flustered Sousuke got about it.

As Sousuke cradles his face, Rin quickly darts his hand round the side of him, grabbing the sketchbook off the desk.

He flips it open, flicking through the pages until he gets to the last one that Sousuke was drawing on.

When he does, he frowns. He turns it upside down as if that’d change the picture, looking at it with about 80% shock, 5% faint amusement and 15% _what the actual holy fuck, Sousuke Yamazaki_.

It’s Sousuke’s latest female protagonist, the wonderfully named Chibiusa ( _“Dude isn’t that the name of a girl out of an anime?” “So what if it is?” “Bro it’s not even a name,” “What if I_ want _it to be a name, Rin?”)_ , except she just happens to be doing _exactly_ what Rin was doing less than five minutes ago.

She’s sat, legs crossed, intently staring at Rin through the page, but is meant to be staring at a video game he guesses, judging by the controller in her hand. The second sketch is her looking up, in probably a very similar fashion to how Rin was looking at Sousuke.

Rin holds his gaze on the drawing for a split second that draws out into what feels like an hour. Sousuke’s drawing his shoujo female protagonist _based off him_.

Come to think of it now, she even looks like him a little bit. Perhaps the resemblance tips more towards Kou and that’s why he’d never noticed it before, but the bangs hanging over her face are unmistakably _Rin’s_ , and that scowl is undoubtedly an almost carbon copy of the one that Rin gives Sousuke all the time.

“Sou,” Rin starts, jerking Sousuke out of his position straight away, “what is this?”

“I, er-,” Sousuke begins, rubbing the back of his neck, “it’s Chibiusa, obviously,”

“She looks like me.” Rin says bluntly, putting the sketchbook down back on the desk and folding his arms over his chest instead. “You were staring at me for character reference,”

“You just have a very emotive face, it’s easy to copy.” Sousuke tries to shrug it off, turning away and moving the hand that had been rubbing at his neck and raking it through his hair instead.

It’s usually Rin that can’t lie for shit, but clearly his influence has been rubbing off on Sousuke, as a baby could probably see through the lie right now.

A bell goes off in the back of his mind and he frowns. “Come to think of it,” he starts, moving round to perch himself on Sousuke’s desk in front of him. “Nagisa started calling me _Chin_ instead of Rin, didn’t he? I thought he’d learnt a new English word and was fucking around as if to insinuate that I have a big chin or something but he-”

“It’s Hazuki, he probably was,”

“Nagisa might be a little shit, but he’s a clever one,” Rin mumbles, lifting a foot to push against Sousuke’s knee gently. “I don’t give a fuck man, it’s just I wasn’t expecting it, that’s all. I’ll pretend I didn’t see it, if you want,”

Sousuke nods a little, putting his face back in his hands, and Rin stifles a giggle, nudging his knee again.

-

He doesn’t bring it up again, but nonetheless that doesn’t mean he doesn’t _think_ about it.

Honestly, he did _try_ not to. After all, he knows that Sousuke is around him so much that it must just be easiest to take facial references from him, and he knows that Sousuke probably wasn’t thinking about Rin finding out when he started doing it.

But he also knows that now Sousuke’s avoiding getting _too close_ to him. Suddenly Sousuke seems to get stiff about Rin asking to stay around at his house practically every other night (it’s just easier to crash there, that’s all) and he seems to shy away when Rin gets physically close to him (even though it’s just a kick or a punch or a fist bump and there’s really nothing for Sousuke to get embarrassed about).

“Oi, Rin,” Sousuke mumbles, snapping Rin out of his reverie. He pulls his eyes from the television screen to his friend, who’s raising an eyebrow at him expectantly. “Were you listening to anything I just said?”

“Huh?”

Sousuke sighs. “The next few pages are ready for you to do the effects on, but Rei wanted to try it out, so I was gonna let him-”

“No,” Rin shakes his head. _No_ , he’s not giving up his one spot to _anyone_ , no matter how much he likes them. And he does, he really does like Rei, but frankly he’ll step all over the kid if it means he gets to keep his work for Sousuke.

“No?” Sousuke questions, raising his eyebrows even further.

“No.” Rin repeats, more than slightly irate. As an excuse to move, he looks down at the crisp bag that sits between the two of them on the sofa and snatches it up, crumpling it and murmuring something about getting another one out of the cupboard.

He ignores Sousuke opening his mouth to ask him something as he storms away. It’s childish, goddamn it he knows that much, but he’s been practically _ignored_ by his best friend for _weeks_ , and then suddenly the only excuse he has to keep coming to see him is being swept away from underneath his feet?

He’d be lying if he said that he couldn’t feel his eyes stinging.

Throwing the new pack of crisps onto the sofa, he avoids eye contact with Sousuke by heading for the TV, turning up the volume manually rather than using the remote. He isn’t actually entirely sure what movie is playing, but he’s not too bothered as long as it gets the message across that he’s not too interested in Sousuke’s conversation right now.

“Are you okay?” Clearly, the volume isn’t loud enough.

“Perfect,”

Rin half expects Sousuke to keep pestering him. For once, however, he gets a respite, and they fall into silence, the (too loud) blaring of the TV keeping them occupied.

That is, until Sousuke shifts himself along the sofa, closer to Rin and closer to the crisps and closer than they’ve been in days. It’s stupid, but Rin’s missed having the physical contact with him, missed being able to have the playful fights and then just collapse on top of each other afterwards. That’s how they’ve always been, since before Sousuke even started drawing, so it’s comforting in a way.

He never realised how much he liked it until it was gone.

He’s starting to feel like he truly _is_ a shoujo manga character right now.

“Rin,” Sousuke starts, tugging at Rin’s jacket, and Rin looks down at him with a hum of acknowledgement. “Can I ask for advice?”

Rin feels his throat close up a bit.

“Sure, shoot bro,”

“Sometimes,” Sousuke begins, and Rin prepares himself for the long emotional speech to follow, “I start drawing out a chapter, and at the start it’s all beautiful and detailed and drawn out, but the more I work, the lazier I get, and the less detail goes in, so my endings are always rushed compared to my beginnings. The amount I draw for the opening scenes is so ridiculously imbalanced.”

_Right_.

“It’s a major problem, I don’t know what to do about it,”

“Why are you asking me?”

“Because,” Sousuke says with a non-committal shrug, “you always help me out with my stories in general.”

“Like how?” Rin scoffs.

“Observing you.”

If Sousuke got any blunter with his words he’d probably turn into one of Nagisa’s fucking blunts.

Rin almost chokes on the crisp that he’d been chewing on, and Sousuke sits up a bit. There’s almost a hint of worry hidden in those teal eyes and hell, Rin internally laughs at that because it is Sousuke’s fault after all.

“ _Observing me_?” He almost spits out (due to a mouthful of food rather than any malice), and Sousuke shrugs again.

“Sure. Rei and Nagisa for one, you and Nanase for a second-”

“ _Haru_? You _observe_ me with _Haru_?” Incredulousness is a tone that Rin’s perfected over the years, and more often than not when it’s brought out it’s to use on Sousuke. “For your _romance_ manga?”

Another shrug.

“Haru is so invested in mackerel and Makoto Tachibana that I think he forgets my name half the time,” Rin grumbles, not without a slight hint of bitterness.

The fact that Sousuke thinks that Rin would want to be with _Haru_ should not upset him. He finds himself more than slightly pissed off though, and really he thinks that if Sousuke can truly be _that_ oblivious there’s probably little point in-

What the hell is he thinking?

Much of the rest of the evening is spent in that same fashion. Sousuke edging closer to him, Rin feeling his stomach twist up, questioning what the actual _hell_ is wrong with him because honestly, he’s never been so damn _confused_.

-

He’s _finally_ figured it out, and he’s not going to pass up the opportunity he has tonight to damn well say something.

“Hey, Sousuke,” Rin starts, clenching his palms into fists. His stomach is tied into a thousand knots and it’s not helping that he can hear Nagisa whispering some damn gross shit to Rei on the ground beneath them. He half wants to scream down from the top of the climbing frame for them both to get a fucking room, but he keeps his mouth shut and focuses on Sousuke instead.

There could be so many repercussions to this. He could lose his best damn friend, he knows that. The one guy that actually does understand him could be gone in the blink of an eye and-

But _fuck it_ , he doesn’t care. There’s this horrible, sickly feeling in his stomach and a slightly unnerving hot prickling sensation all over his skin whenever he so much as _thinks_ about Sousuke and he’s done with it, done with keeping the secret.

“Rin,” Sousuke replies unknowingly, leaning back on his splayed hands and tilting his head back so that he’s looking up at the sky.

It’s now or never, Rin knows that.

The second he draws in a breath to say it, the fireworks start.

The first bang makes him jump with a little yelp, almost having him fall off the bars. He doesn’t though, thanks to Sousuke wrapping his hands around Rin’s waist instead, keeping him right there. It’s when Rin realises that Sousuke is looking at _him_ , not the fireworks, that he starts to take in the breath again, ready to finally say it, even if Sousuke can’t hear him.

“I lov-”

“I know,” Sousuke says, cutting Rin dead short. Rin feels his heart plummet at the words, at the _I know_ rather than the _I do too_ , but luckily he doesn’t start crying before Sousuke amends his statement. “I love the fireworks too,”

Perhaps the whole ‘not crying’ thing was assumed too early.

He’s opening his mouth again, tears filling his eyes. He clutches onto Sousuke’s jacket, about to start murmuring about stupid Yamazaki, but then Sousuke’s quickly reaching down to cup Rin’s chin and pull his face back up so that their eyes meet. “Dude, I was only fucking with you, I’m sorry, don’t cry, holy shit Rin,”

“You fucking _idiot_ ,” Rin mumbles, still latching onto Sousuke’s coat. “I tell you that I love you and you fucking-”

“I love you too,”

By the time the fireworks end, Rin’s settled into Sousuke’s shoulder, sniffling away but with dry eyes. 


End file.
